Rosa Luxemburg

The title of this article is ambiguous. For other meanings, see Rosa Luxemburg (disambiguation).

Rosa Luxemburg (b. 5 March 1871 as Rozalia Luxenburg in Zamość, Congress Poland, Imperial Russia; † 15 January 1919 in Berlin) was an influential Polish-Russian exponent of the European labour movement, Marxism, antimilitarism and proletarian internationalism.

From 1887 she was active in the Polish, and from 1898 also in the German Social Democracy. There she fought nationalism, opportunism and revisionism from the beginning. She advocated mass strikes as a means of bringing about socio-political change and preventing war. Immediately after the beginning of the First World War in 1914, she founded the "Gruppe Internationale", from which the Spartakusbund emerged. This she led as a political prisoner together with Karl Liebknecht through political writings in which she analysed and condemned the SPD's Burgfrieden policy. She affirmed the October Revolution, but at the same time criticized the democratic centralism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. During the November Revolution, she tried to influence current events as editor-in-chief of the newspaper Die Rote Fahne in Berlin. As author of the Spartakusbund program, she called for a soviet republic and the disempowerment of the military on December 14, 1918. In early 1919 she co-founded the Communist Party of Germany, which adopted her program but refused to participate in the upcoming parliamentary elections as she had demanded. After the ensuing Spartacus Uprising was put down, she and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by members of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division. These murders deepened the split between the SPD and the KPD.

Rosa Luxemburg (1915)

Political thought and action

Marxism as a self-critical method of capitalism analysis

Rosa Luxemburg vigorously advocated the ideas of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, she did not interpret their theories dogmatically, but critically:

"Marxism is a revolutionary world-view which must always struggle for new knowledge, which abhors nothing so much as ossification in forms once valid, which best preserves its living force in the intellectual clash of arms of self-criticism and in historical thunder and lightning."

In two essays on Marx, she updated his basic ideas quite differently. For Franz Mehring's 1901 biography of Marx, she wrote a summary of Capital. In it she explained

the emergence of profit from the law of wages, which always deprives the worker of part of the equivalent value of his product (Volume 1);
the competitive laws of the market, which force the entrepreneur to "realize" his profit profitably in turn, as well as the credit system, which keeps the production process and the movement of goods going (Volume 2);
the law of the "average rate of profit", which conditions the distribution of socially produced wealth and produces the inevitable "crises" in the capitalist economy (Volume 3).

For them, these regularities established the fundamental class solidarity of the owners of capital vis-à-vis the producers, so that structural exploitation could only be overcome through the abolition of wage labour and class rule.

As a party lecturer from 1907, then in 1916 while imprisoned, she also wrote a generally understandable introduction to national economics, which appeared posthumously in 1925.

Imperialism Theory

In her 1913 magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg developed her theory of imperialism. She showed, similarly to John Atkinson Hobson's earlier theory of underconsumption, that imperialism was "a historical necessity, the concluding stage of capitalist development".

In critical reference to Marx's remarks on the scheme of extended reproduction (capital accumulation) in the second volume of "Capital", she demonstrates, among other things also with reference to Engels' remarks on Marx's manuscripts, that Marx did not work out this point conclusively and without contradiction, but rather contradicts his own solution elsewhere, namely in the third volume and in the theories on surplus value, and that his solution is a simple arithmetical construction. The problem here is already for Marx the question of who realizes (buys) surplus-value, i.e. the additional mountain of commodities, in the case of total social accumulation. Marx tried to solve the problem, among other things, with the concept of extended money production (mining capital for gold), which he had previously rejected, but elsewhere in Capital called this "tasteless". Rosa Luxemburg also shows, in terms of theoretical history, that bourgeois political economy before Marx had already wrestled intensively with this problem and was unable to provide a solution to the lack of demand for the surplus product at the conclusion of accumulation, but rather, in the interest of avoiding the crises, somehow wanted to mediate the contradictions politically or simply denied them.

Since neither the workers nor the capitalists come into question as consumers for the surplus product, i.e. for the realisation of surplus value in Marx's scheme of expanded reproduction, according to Rosa Luxemburg the market must be expanded accordingly. Capitalist growth is thus always ensured at the expense of natural economic and non-capitalist modes of production, both within and outside the country. She traces this expansion on the basis of colonial history: 1. with the dissolution of the natural economy through the compulsory introduction of ownership of land and thus the division of communally organised natural resources, 2. through the introduction of the commodity economy, 3. through the dissolution of the peasantry and, connected with this, finally 4. through the introduction of large-scale capitalist production, above all with the capital of the colonial powers. The bloody colonial conflicts associated with the expropriations for the realization of surplus value, for example the Opium War in China, the colonization of South Africa, the War of Secession and the tax burdens associated with it, or the North African and Asia Minor colonial efforts of German capital, are extensively used by her as historical material in this context.

By considering the accumulation of capital, which is its sole purpose, thus as not inherent in the system, for example accumulation for accumulation's sake, i.e. growth of the machine-building industry for the increased production of machines without final consumption, she declares in summary at the end of her consideration the dissolution of simple commodity production:

"The general result of the struggle between capitalism and simple commodity economy is this: Capital itself takes the place of simple commodity economy, having substituted commodity economy for natural economy. If, then, capitalism lives on non-capitalist formations, it lives, more precisely, on the ruin of these formations, and if it absolutely needs the non-capitalist milieu for accumulation, it needs it as a breeding ground, at the expense of which, through the absorption of which, accumulation takes place. Historically conceived, capital accumulation is a process of metabolism that takes place between the capitalist and the pre-capitalist modes of production. Without it, the accumulation of capital cannot proceed, but accumulation, taken from this side, consists in the gnawing and assimilation of those. Capital accumulation can therefore no more exist without the non-capitalist formations than the latter can exist alongside it. Only in the constant progressive crumbling of the latter are the conditions of existence of capital accumulation given. [...] But here the impasse begins. Once the final result is achieved - which, however, remains only a theoretical construction - accumulation becomes an impossibility: the realization and capitalization of surplus value is transformed into an insoluble task. At the moment when the Marxian scheme of extended reproduction corresponds to reality, it indicates the exit, the historical limit of the accumulation movement, that is, the end of capitalist production. The impossibility of accumulation means, capitalistically, the impossibility of the further development of the productive forces, and thus the objective historical necessity of the downfall of capitalism. From this arises the contradictory movement of the last, imperialist phase as the final period in the historical trajectory of capital."

By demonstrating colonialism as a compelling necessity of capitalism, she also expanded and modified Marx's theory of crisis:

"It excludes, on the other hand, the deep fundamental contradiction between the productive capacity and the consumptive capacity of capitalist society, which arises precisely from the accumulation of capital, which periodically gives vent to itself in crises, and which drives capital to constant market expansion."

In her opinion, this is the only way to properly understand the history of capitalism in the 19th century.

"The scheme thus presupposes a movement of total capital which contradicts the actual course of capitalist development. The history of the capitalist mode of production is characterized at first sight by two facts: on the one hand, periodic erratic expansion of the whole field of production; on the other, highly uneven development of various branches of production. The history of the English cotton industry, the most characteristic chapter in the history of the capitalist mode of production from the last quarter of the eighteenth to the seventies of the nineteenth century, appears completely inexplicable from the standpoint of the Marxian scheme."

Combating reformism

Beginning in 1896, Eduard Bernstein published his series of articles revising Marx's alleged theory of collapse. He concluded from the temporary absence of crises that capitalism had proved unexpectedly durable. The SPD, he argued, must therefore abandon its revolutionary goals and concentrate entirely on improving the living conditions of workers: "The goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything."

Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution summed up her response:

If Bernstein were right, social democracy would be superfluous. Waiting for the automatic, just distribution of society's wealth, however, is utopian and, like Don Quixote, condemns the SPD to failure.
Cartels, trusts, joint-stock companies did not prove the gradual self-control and democratization of capital, but were part of its concentration process.
Since productivity was constantly growing, while the world market had natural limits, crises were inevitable. However, their temporary absence - the German Reich experienced a prolonged boom until 1910 - did not refute Marx.
Trade unions could only try to cut off as large a slice as possible of the cake of entrepreneurial profit within the framework of the wage law, but in this way they could never overcome exploitation.
Social democracy was only tolerated in bourgeois society as long as it remained silent. Only in the collapse of the capitalist system would it be given a share in power.
That is why the revolution is and remains absolutely necessary. The SPD must take the lead in building the necessary class consciousness and promote the workers' self-activity, not block it.

These sentences, which foresaw some of the coming developments, were rejected at the time by many party and trade union functionaries, who hoped for recognition through adaptation in the empire and gains in votes by renouncing revolution. Rosa Luxemburg thus did not set the upheaval of production relations against the everyday struggle for better living conditions, but advocated an interlocking of reform and revolution in the proletarian struggle for self-liberation. Reforms were also intended to form the political consciousness of the workers and prevent the SPD from being appropriated to preserve the class of the bourgeoisie.

Critical solidarity with the October Revolution

After the fall of the tsar as a result of the February Revolution of 1917, Rosa Luxemburg wrote the article The Revolution in Russia. In it she stressed the driving force of the Russian proletariat in the events. Its rise to power had initially pushed the liberal bourgeoisie to the forefront of the revolutionary movement. Its task now was to put an end to the imperialist war. To do this, it would have to fight its own bourgeoisie, which desperately needed and wanted to continue the war. This war had made Russia ripe for socialist revolution.

Thus she foresaw that only another revolution in the Russian Empire would end the war. For the Mensheviks, like German and French social democrats, wanted to continue to win advantages for their country. But because the urban industrial proletariat in Russia was proportionately much smaller than the backward rural small peasantry, Rosa Luxemburg, like Lenin, considered an analogous German revolution indispensable to create the conditions for socialism in both countries at the same time as the war ended. To this end, she wanted to unite the pan-European workers movement to the best of her ability.

Rosa Luxemburg welcomed Lenin's attempt at revolution after he forcibly dissolved the Constituent Assembly. But she criticized the Bolsheviks for thereby abrogating any parliamentary control over their policies. She recognised that Lenin was beginning to suppress not only other parties but also democracy within his own party. This threatened the absolutely necessary participation and leadership of the workers in building socialism. That is why, after the October Revolution, she criticized the Bolsheviks' tendency toward party dictatorship with the famous phrases:

"Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for members of a party - however numerous they may be - is not freedom. Freedom is always freedom of dissenters. Not because of the fanaticism of 'justice,' but because all that is invigorating, wholesome, and purifying in political liberty hangs upon that essence, and fails of its effect when 'liberty' becomes a privilege."

When she spoke of the freedom of dissenters, however, Luxemburg was not thinking of "class enemies" or "class traitors", emphasises historian Heinrich August Winkler. It was not liberal democracy but socialist pluralism that she had in mind.

In a sharp confrontation with the dictatorship theory of Lenin and Trotsky, she goes on to say that the latter, on the one hand, like Kautsky on the other, commit the fundamental error of opposing dictatorship to democracy. In doing so, they would be two opposite poles equally distant from real socialist politics.

"The proletariat, when it seizes power, can never, according to Kautsky's good advice [...] renounce social revolution and devote itself only to democracy, without betraying itself, the revolution. It should and must just immediately undertake socialist measures in the most energetic, most unyielding, most ruthless manner, i.e., exercise dictatorship; but dictatorship of the CLASS, not of a party or clique, dictatorship of the class, i.e., in the broadest public sphere, with the most active uninhibited participation of the masses of the people, in unrestricted democracy."

She goes on to say that it is not a matter of idolatry to formal democracy, nor to socialism or Marxism, but rather that the "bitter core of social inequality and unfreedom under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom" must be filled with new social content. In this sense, she defines the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

"It is the historical task of the proletariat, when it comes to power, to create socialist democracy in place of bourgeois democracy, not to abolish all democracy. [...] Socialist democracy begins at the same time with the dismantling of class rule and the building of socialism. It begins with the moment of the conquest of power by the socialist party. It is nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Yes: dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the way democracy is used, not in its abolition, in vigorous, determined interventions in the acquired rights and economic relations of bourgeois society, without which the socialist revolution cannot be realized. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class, and not of a small, leading minority in the name of the class; that is to say, it must arise at every turn from the active participation of the masses, be under their immediate influence, be under the control of the whole public, arise from the growing political training of the popular masses."

She explained the dilemma in which she saw the Russian Revolution in the historical context as stemming from the "complete failure of the international proletariat"-especially the SPD-in the face of imperialist war. In spite of all the necessary and justified criticism, Lenin deserves credit for having dared to make the revolution. In doing so, he had opened up the world-historical opposition between labor and capital internationally and made it conscious. In doing so, she also justified his violent measures, of which she was only initially aware at the time:

"Socialism [...] has as its prerequisite a series of violent measures - against property [...] Whoever opposes the storm wagon of socialist revolution will be left on the ground with his limbs shattered."

Now it became the "historical responsibility" of the German workers to rise up as well to end the war. That is why she enthusiastically welcomed the German January strikes for peace and tried to make the Germans aware of what she saw as the latent historical goal, international socialism, from within the prison.

When the German November Revolution deposed the Kaiser, it immediately resumed agitating for proletarian revolution:

"The abolition of the rule of capital, the realization of the socialist social order - this and nothing less is the historical theme of the present revolution. A tremendous work which cannot be accomplished in the twinkling of an eye by a few decrees from on high, which can only be brought into being by the own conscious action of the masses of working people in town and country, which can only be brought happily into port through all storms by the highest spiritual maturity and inexhaustible idealism of the masses of the people."

After Ebert had deprived the "Vollzugsrat" of its power, it called on the workers' and soldiers' councils to seize power on 10 December 1918. The soviet republic was the natural program of the revolution. But from soldier - the "gendarme of reaction" - to revolutionary proletarian was still a long way. The military, which had hitherto served the "fatherland," must first learn to subordinate its power to the common good and, to this end, be placed under the political control of the workers councils.

Ebert's secret pact with Reichswehr General Groener prevented this in the Christmas riots. Thereupon the radical left groups founded the KPD. Rosa Luxemburg unsuccessfully campaigned for their participation in the elections to the Weimar Reichstag, in order to work for the continuation of the revolution there as well.

Dialectics of the Class Struggle and the Task of the Workers' Parties

Rosa Luxemburg understood history with Marx and Engels as a permanent class struggle. In it, she argued, there was a tendency to recognise the causes of exploitation and thus to revolutionise relations:

"The modern proletarian class does not wage its struggle according to some ready-made scheme laid down in a book, in a theory; the modern working-class struggle is a piece in history, a piece of social development, and in the midst of history, in the midst of development, in the midst of struggle, we learn how to struggle."

In this revolutionary learning process, spontaneity and organisation of the working class drove each other forward. For Rosa Luxemburg, the two are inseparable "moments" of the same process, which are mutually dependent. For unplanned action - for example, wildcat strikes against wage cuts - responded to current challenges. In this elementary struggle, workers would gradually come to recognize the historical tasks and goals of their class. This insight would in turn raise their struggle to a higher level and lead to the formation of organisations, for example trade unions. These would orient and concentrate their action towards long-term planned goals, for example collective agreements. To make conscious and to promote the tendency to overcome exploitation contained therein would be the task of the workers' party. In doing so, it could not detach itself from the workers' own activity:

"The working class in all countries learns to fight only in the course of its struggle...Social-Democracy...which is only the vanguard of the proletariat, a part of the whole working mass, the blood of its blood and flesh of its flesh, this Social-Democracy seeks and finds the ways and particular slogans of the workers' struggle only in the measure of the development of this struggle, drawing from this struggle alone the indications for the way ahead."

Rosa Luxemburg thus believed that without organisation, spontaneous strikes would only have temporary success, but no lasting power and effect to change society as a whole. Without the workers' own activity, their organisations would also soon lose their thrust, the political goal of socialism. Unlike Engels, Kautsky and Lenin, she did not see the workers party as a mere electoral party, nor as an elitist cadre party following from "scientific" insight into the course of history:

"Social Democracy is nothing other than the embodiment of the class struggle of the modern proletariat, borne by consciousness of its historical consequences. Its real leader is in reality the masses themselves [...] The more Social Democracy develops, grows, strengthens, the more the enlightened working mass takes its destinies, the direction of its overall movement, the determination of its guidelines into its own hands with each passing day. And just as Social Democracy as a whole is only the conscious vanguard of the proletarian class movement, which, according to the words of the Communist Manifesto, represents the permanent interests of liberation in every individual moment of the struggle, and the interests of the total movement in the face of every partial group interest of the working class, so within Social Democracy its leaders are the more powerful, the more influential, the more clearly and consciously they make themselves only the mouthpiece of the will and aspirations of the enlightened masses, only the bearers of the objective laws of the class movement."

The party is thus not supposed to "represent" or "lead" the proletariat, but only to be its "vanguard". For Rosa Luxemburg it was impossible to separate it from its own movement, which was partly spontaneous and partly organised, but emerged from it and expressed it consciously. It had only the insight into the necessity of socialism ahead of the workers, but not the means to realise it without them. It could not plan and force the revolution unless the workers themselves were ready, able and ripe for it. Its task, therefore, was to train the consciousness of the workers about their historical mission until they were independently capable of overturning the relations of production.

Rosa Luxemburg's Marxist theory of class struggle, for its part, arose as a result of real processes: Around 1900, more and larger mass strikes broke out in Europe, especially in Russia and Poland. They led to the Russian Revolution of 1905, in the course of which the tsar had to grant the people democratic rights such as the formation of their own parties. These in turn prepared the ground for the next revolution, which overthrew the Tsar in 1917. Rosa Luxemburg tried to make these experiences of struggle fruitful for the German workers. That is why, from 1905, she demanded that the SPD prepare resolutely for the political general strike. With this linking of political party organisation and workers' education in the workplace, she wanted to ward off two things:

an everyday work of the workers' parties and trade unions that loses and abandons the goal of the international socialist revolution ("opportunism", "revisionism", "reformism");
Forms of organization that take off, no longer represent the true workers' interests and ossify dictatorially ("centralism," "bureaucratism").

The self-organization of the councils should strengthen the workers parties to assert the overall interest of the proletariat ever more effectively. If they lost contact with their base, they would inevitably fail, in Luxemburg's view. But she believed that the internal contradictions of capitalism, the opposition of capital and labour, would always put the proletarian revolution on the political agenda. This itself, not the party, would train the masses to be revolutionaries. Only by relying on this could the workers parties determine and achieve their short- and long-term goals:

"History is the only true teacher, revolution is the best school of the proletariat. They will see to it that the 'little band' of the most slandered and persecuted will become, step by step, what their world outlook destines them to be: the fighting and victorious mass of the revolutionary socialist proletariat."

Rosa Luxemburg had gained this conviction at the time of the first mass strikes in Poland and found it reinforced by similar mass strikes in Russia, Belgium and northern Europe around 1905. She had tried to introduce the SPD to the transnational general strike as a political means of struggle in time to practically prevent the world war. When this failed, she agreed with Lenin that the crisis brought to a head by the war must lead to revolution and be exploited. The new mass strikes in the course of the war confirmed their confidence in the spontaneity of the working class, which learned from its defeats: new forms of self-organisation emerged from the disappointments with the SPD leadership, especially among workers in the German armaments industry. Under the pressure of illegality, the Spartacists tried to orient the USPD and the council movement towards joint revolutionary action in time. But in the German November Revolution, spontaneity and party organizations did not work in concert. The result was only the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a bourgeois republic, but the socialization of the war-important means of production decided at the time by the Reichsrätekongress failed to materialize.

Combating the misrepresentation of interests

A party that "represents" and patronizes the workers in parliaments or a "politburo" will inevitably no longer act for them but against them. It would then itself become the tool of those who wanted to prevent the revolution and turn back its successes. Then the workers would also have to fight a so-called "workers party".

Thus Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the Red Banner of 21 December 1918:

"In all previous revolutions the fighters entered the fray with open sights [...] In today's revolution the protective groups of the old order enter the fray not under their own shields and coats of arms of the ruling classes, but under the banner of a Social-Democratic party. If the cardinal question of the revolution were openly and honestly to be: capitalism or socialism, doubt, wavering would be impossible in the great mass of the proletariat today."

- The Red Flag of December 21, 1918

That is why the workers would necessarily have to continue the direct class struggle in bourgeois democracy: in parliaments, but also against them, or both at the same time, depending on the circumstances. In fact, only a general strike prevented a right-wing military dictatorship once again in 1920, but in the following years the workers movement was divided into two hostile camps that fought each other more than the common opponent, so that they were ultimately unable to stop the decline of the Weimar Republic.

Faith in the proletarian revolution

On the eve of her assassination, Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

"The leadership has failed. But the leadership can and must be recreated by the masses and from the masses. The masses are the decisive factor, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were at the height, they shaped this 'defeat' into a limb of those historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why from this 'defeat' the future victory will blossom. - "Order reigns in Berlin! You blunt henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. To-morrow the revolution will already 'rattlingly straighten itself up again' and proclaim to your horror with the sound of a trumpet: 'I was, I am, I will be!'"

The last sentence quotes the 1848 revolutionary Ferdinand Freiligrath, who praised the revolution with this biblical expression as a recurring "red thread" of history. Their related criticism of the leadership concerned not only Ebert but also Hugo Haase (USPD) and Liebknecht (KPD), whose occupation action in January 1919 was miserably planned. A huge crowd of waiting demonstrators was ready at the time to blockade and disarm the approaching soldiers, but was not included by the occupiers.

Rosa Luxemburg - unlike Kautsky and the SPD party executive - did not believe in a determinism of international revolution in the wake of impoverishment and the collapse of capital rule through war. If socialism failed, humanity would be threatened with a relapse into unimaginable barbarism. The awareness of this either-or was the decisive driving force behind her actions. She considered setbacks and defeats of the working people to be particularly important for their learning process: they could sharpen the historical consciousness of the unavoidable necessity of revolution. It was therefore not the "final victory" that was the "pride" of the workers movement, but the ever new attempt to bring it about.

Rosa Luxemburg thus trusted the constant learning capacity of working people, their indestructible ability to determine their own history and lead it to a goal that would free everyone, not just a minority, from the yoke of class domination. It drew this confidence from real historical attempts and social movements to achieve a just world society.

Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (1910)

Reception

Weimar Republic

The anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg's death (15 January) became a regular commemoration day for the left. The song Auf, auf zum Kampf was supplemented in 1919 with verses on the double murder of the Spartacus leaders. Max Beckmann depicted Rosa Luxemburg's murder in 1919 with his painting Martyrium mit Zügen der Kreuzigung Jesu Christi (Martyrdom with features of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ) as a lust murder of the German nation (Germania), which was intended to particularly affect persecuted and disadvantaged groups such as pacifists, communists, Jews and women.

Kurt Eisner, the first Minister President of Bavaria commented shortly before his assassination:

"The act testifies to a deep inner sickness and crudeness of the German people."

- Kurt Eisner 1919

Arnold Zweig praised the assassin in his 1919 eulogy for Spartacus as a martyr for the immortal idea of world peace. He attributed Rosa Luxemburg's revolutionary attitude to her Jewishness. Luise Kautsky published a selection of her letters from prison to herself, Karl Kautsky, Mathilde Jacob, Sophie "Sonja" Liebknecht and others in 1920. The letters showed a personal side of Rosa Luxemburg that had been little known until then and were often reprinted. In 1921, Richard Lewinsohn praised Rosa Luxemburg in the Weltbühne as the greatest revolutionary ever to have existed in Germany. Artists close to the KPD stylised Rosa Luxemburg as a martyr of the proletariat, whose example was to mobilise the masses for the fight against war, "counter-revolution" (meaning above all social democracy) and fascism. They also placed her alongside representatives of the Soviet Union like Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, whose policies she had sharply rejected.

Leo Jogiches pushed the investigation of the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht with articles in the Red Banner. He was arrested in March 1919 and murdered in prison. Some of those involved in the crime were court-martialed. The Guard Cavalry Rifle Division chose its judge, Paul Jorns. He delayed the investigation and covered up the complicity of the senior officers. In May 1919 he acquitted most of those involved in the crime and sentenced only Runge and Vogel to minor prison terms and fines respectively. Runge failed to appear in court, was transferred, and evaded punishment by leaving Germany. Pabst was not charged, and possible principals were not sought. Despite many protests, Noske, as Reichswehr Minister, confirmed the sentences and prevented an appeal. In 1929, Paul Levi, as a defence lawyer, proved the cover-up of the murders by Paul Jorns. For the historian Wolfram Wette, the "interplay of right-wing extremist military and political justice" in covering up perpetrators and backgrounds continued in many other political murders of opponents of the war.

Paul Levi became the new KPD chairman in 1919 and followed its program by uniting the KPD with the left wing of the USPD (some 300,000 members) in November 1920, making it a mass party. In February 1921 he resigned because the Communist International (CI) was trying to steer the course of the KPD. After the failure of the March struggles in central Germany in 1922, he published Rosa Luxemburg's critical prison essay on the October Revolution against the "putschism" of the KPD. As a result, the KPD expelled him and his supporters. Against Levi's intention, some Social Democrats used Luxemburg's critique of Lenin for a general anti-communism. As a result, the KPD distanced itself from her even more. The new KPD leader Ruth Fischer wrote in 1924: "Whoever wants to cure Brandler's 'centralism' by invoking Rosa Luxemburg, wants to cure a gonorrhea patient by instilling syphilis bacilli." Levi, in turn, criticized in 1924 with reference to Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Lenin: "The freedom which the Bolsheviks, like the tsar, claim for themselves lacks the measure to the freedom of others and thus loses all its qualities."

The criminal psychologist Erich Wulffen and the "cripple pedagogue" Hans Würtz described Rosa Luxemburg in the 1920s prototypically as a woman who was fanatical and ready to commit crimes because of her physical handicap.

In 1925, in its "Theses on the Bolshevisation of the Communist Parties", the CI identified the "errors of Luxemburgism". With this slogan, Rosa Luxemburg's positions in the Soviet Union and in the KPD were henceforth devalued as dangerous errors. In 1926, the KPD adopted Josef Stalin's social-fascism thesis, according to which the Free Trade Unions and the SPD in particular were the main enemies of the proletariat. In 1929, on the tenth anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg's death, the SPD newspaper Vorwärts wrote that the communists had not followed her in 1919. The assertion that the SPD or individual Social Democrats had wanted the murder of the Spartacus leaders was a lie that amounted to a desecration of the grave. The KPD glorified the Bolsheviks' atrocities against dissidents. This would have shown Luxemburg and Liebknecht the error of their ways if they had survived. In 1931, as part of his propaganda campaign against Trotskyism, Stalin claimed that Rosa Luxemburg had invented Leon Trotsky's "theory of permanent revolution" and that Lenin had uncompromisingly rejected "Luxemburgism". Trotsky refuted these claims in 1932 with quotes from Lenin as a falsification of history. But KPD leader Ernst Thälmann also claimed in 1932: "In all those questions in which Rosa Luxemburg held a different view from Lenin, her opinion was erroneous, so that the whole group of German left radicals in the pre-war and wartime period fell very considerably short of the Bolsheviks in clarity and revolutionary firmness." He called for the "sharpest struggle against the remnants of Luxemburgism" and described it as a "theoretical platform of counterrevolutionary tendencies."

Within the majority Social Democracy, Luxemburg's left-wing radicalism was criticized and explained, albeit usually behind closed doors, by her Jewish origins. Among revisionist Social Democrats, on the other hand, it was unusual to mention her Jewish origins, if any. The division and paralysis of the workers' movement greatly promoted the political rise of National Socialism. The Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund and the NSDAP defamed the Weimar Republic as a "Jewish republic" and increasingly used the anti-Semitic term "Jewish Bolshevism," which had originated in Russia. Adolf Hitler met Waldemar Pabst during a visit to Berlin in 1920. Both supported the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch of that time. In 1925, Paul von Hindenburg was elected president of the Reich. This replacement of Ebert by a former OHL representative was in line with Rosa Luxemburg's predictions. Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, thus enabling the "barbarism" of another world war and further genocides that she feared.

NS era

After Hitler's rise to power, the Nazi regime granted Otto Runge, who now called himself Wilhelm Radolf and had not served a day of his prison sentence, 6,000 Reichsmark in prison compensation. During the book burning in Germany in 1933, the National Socialists also burned all of Rosa Luxemburg's writings that had been published until then. In 1935 they destroyed her and Karl Liebknecht's grave. Eduard Stadtler stated in his memoirs published in 1935 that he had persuaded Pabst to commit the murders in direct conversation.

In his 1939 exile novel about the November Revolution, Alfred Döblin portrayed Rosa Luxemburg retrospectively as a clever, strategically far-sighted and realistic politician, but predominantly as a hysteric and ecstatic mystic. In doing so, he referred to imaginary conversations with her slain lover Hans Diefenbach and Satan in private letters. The depiction is considered artistically free, not historically accurate.

GDR

The SED, founded in 1946, always accused Rosa Luxemburg of "spontaneism", which had contributed to the failure of the November Revolution. It rejected her views as a whole as "Luxemburgism" in the wake of Stalin. Fred Oelßner wrote in 1951 in the party official Luxemburg biography:

"For as great as Rosa Luxemburg's services to the German workers' movement were, as much as we bow in reverence to her militant life, as much as we love Rosa for her unsparing struggle for the cause of the workers, we must not forget: Great, too, were her errors and mistakes, which led the German working class along false paths. Above all, we must not close our eyes to the fact that it is not a question of individual errors, but of a whole system of false conceptions ('Luxemburgism'). These views were one of the decisive causes of the defeats of the Communist Party of Germany after its foundation, of the falsification of the role of the party by the Brandlerists, of the underestimation of the national question and the peasant question, which was not overcome despite the efforts of Ernst Thälmann. [...] This also included the struggle against the remnants of Luxemburgism, which is nothing but a variety of social-democratism."

The SED organised the commemoration of the anniversary of her death, which had been celebrated since 1919, as an annual Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration in Berlin. In doing so, it made it the most important state demonstration of power alongside May Day and appropriated Rosa Luxemburg to legitimize the GDR. The meticulous official organisation and the prescribed, largely involuntary participation did not generate any real enthusiasm among parts of those involved. In the GDR, her complete works were not published until 1970, and her critique of Lenin not until 1974. Her radical-democratic and anti-militarist texts were thereby commented on as "errors".

SED dissidents and civil rights activists in the GDR invoked Luxemburg's texts to criticise the SED's autocracy and inability to reform. Bertolt Brecht's 1948 poem Eine Jüdin aus Polen (A Jewish Woman from Poland) about Rosa Luxemburg met with rejection in the then SBZ, as did later memories of her in his works in the GDR. In 1965, Robert Havemann called for a new, reformed KPD in both parts of Germany and for the ban on the KPD in the Federal Republic to be lifted. The new KPD, he said, should be based especially on Rosa Luxemburg's writings, which had been suppressed for decades by Stalinists: "They were suppressed because Rosa Luxemburg, with prophetic clarity, had already recognized and sharply criticized the first dangerous steps toward the elimination of inner-party democracy, which later led to Stalinism." The statute and programme of the new KPD would have to be "democratic and make any relapse into 'Stalinist' centralism impossible from the outset" by allowing oppositional factions and criticism of members from within and without. In 1968, Havemann called for democratic socialism for the GDR, referring to Luxemburg's quote about the freedom of dissenters.

Wolf Biermann welcomed the publication of Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Lenin in 1974 as a great step forward for the GDR. He called for its comprehensive democratization as a consequence, if necessary through a revolution, and for the unity of the left in East and West Germany. He quoted the sentence about the freedom of dissenters in his concert in Cologne in 1976, whereupon the GDR government expatriated him. The quote was on a poster put up by protesters at the annual official celebrations of the anniversary of their deaths on January 17, 1988. The incident triggered a wave of arrests and expulsions and is considered a harbinger of the fall of communism in 1989.

The city of Berlin named "Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz" after her in 1947. After the fall of communism in the GDR in 1989, Dresden, Erfurt and Weimar each named a square Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and erected monuments to her there.

Federal Republic of Germany

In his 1946 dissertation (Die Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik), Ossip K. Flechtheim sharply distinguished the founding generation of the KPD around Rosa Luxemburg from the mentality of the later KPD leaders and the soviet republic sought by the Spartacists from the authoritarian state system of the Soviet Union. He thus established Rosa Luxemburg's image as a "democratic communist". In the 1960s he edited her political writings. In his work From Marx to Kolakowski (1978), he stressed that Rosa Luxemburg had contradicted the deterministic belief in progress of historical materialism with the alternative "socialism or barbarism". As the first Marxist, she had clearly foreseen the potential for violence of the ruling classes and the coming First World War, and had recognised the bourgeoisification and bureaucratisation of social democracy as an adaptation to the authoritarian features of the Kaiserreich. The SPD's approval of the war and the "Burgfrieden" justified Rosa Luxemburg's claim to the right of socialist resistance, which included revolutionary violence if necessary.

SPD representatives have interpreted Rosa Luxemburg's ideas contradictorily. The Godesberg Programme of 1959 excluded many of the main aims of Marxism, such as the socialisation of the means of production, which had again seemed plausible after 1945. Willy Brandt declared in 1968, on the 50th anniversary of the November Revolution, that Rosa Luxemburg, had she lived, would have resolutely opposed "Marxism-Leninism" and the party dictatorship it justified in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. In 1982 he explained in his autobiography that the SAPD, which he had co-founded in 1931, had been modelled on Rosa Luxemburg, who had been regarded by many young socialists as the representative of an "unadulterated" social democracy. Her statement about the freedom of dissenters anticipated the SPD's postulate of "no socialism without democracy. She had not wanted a KPD subordinate to the Bolsheviks and had opposed the founding of the CI. A stamp with the portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, approved in 1973 by the then Federal Minister for Post and Telecommunications Horst Ehmke, triggered a Bundestag debate and fierce protests from the CDU and CSU. The stamp was seen as a sign that Rosa Luxemburg would be reinstated in the SPD's "gallery of ancestors".

Until the 1980s, the Young Socialists advocated Marxist theories and also referred to Rosa Luxemburg. In his research on the council movement in 1976, Peter von Oertzen came to the conclusion that the unguided spontaneous democratisation of large-scale enterprises, born out of the crisis-like escalation of conditions, had impressively proved Rosa Luxemburg's thesis of the spontaneity of the working class. Bärbel Meurer recalled in 1988 that Rosa Luxemburg had criticised the SPD's "Burgfrieden" policy in 1916, because the SPD had given up the few democratic civil rights it had fought for and the struggle for them against August Bebel's line, which had been valid for decades. Gisela Notz, on the other hand, summed up Rosa Luxemburg's 1916 critique thus: "In her Junius pamphlet and other writings, she denounced the patriotic attitude of Social Democracy as a betrayal." In 2009, Tilman Fichter attributed the SPD's 1914 war approval to a paralysis of the party organization caused by "organizational patriotism" in the SPD leadership. Like Helga Grebing, he held Gustav Noske responsible for the double murders: although Noske had not ordered them, he had allowed them by omitting the order to bring the imprisoned Spartacists immediately to a specific assembly point. The historical commission of the SPD had to clarify whether with Noske also "the leadership of the majority Social Democracy at that time bore the political responsibility for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht".

The non-Marxist philosopher Hannah Arendt drew on Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism in her study of the elements and origins of total domination. She interpreted völkisch nationalism as an outgrowth of continental imperialism, which made anti-Semitism racist and racism anti-Semitic, ending in the extermination of the Jews and the Slavs. For Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg was also a positive example of the worldliness of the political: "For Rosa Luxemburg, the world was of very great importance, and she was not at all interested in herself. ... she could not come to terms with the injustice in the world."

In the "New Left" of the 1960s, Rosa Luxemburg was regarded as an early representative of anti-authoritarian socialism. In the run-up to the Paris May 1968, students named a lecture hall at Nanterre University after her. German students named the University of Cologne after her. Student leader Rudi Dutschke saw Rosa Luxemburg as a radical democratic, not Leninist, communist. He invoked her revolutionary concept of the spontaneity of the working class and tried to use it for new political approaches, such as a permanent "cultural revolution" in bourgeois late capitalism. In 1978, he affirmed Rosa Luxemburg's 1918 critique of Lenin: she had not been able to separate democracy and freedom of speech from the dictatorship of the proletariat and had insisted on the legacy of the bourgeois revolution in order to make the proletarian revolution possible. That was why she had opposed the Bolsheviks' factional and party bans. Her criticisms had not been adequately considered by Social Democrats, Leninists or Trotskyists after the publication of the essay in 1922. For Jacob Talmon, it was only in the New Left that an academic interest in Rosa Luxemburg independent of party politics emerged: "Before that, she was an embarrassment to all parties, with the exception of a few nonconformist Marxists who had been friends of hers and to whom her tragic end was close."

In 1962, Pabst declared that he had "judged" the Spartacist leaders. Noske had brought his division to "liberate" Berlin from the hands of the Spartacists. A court-martial could not have been convened in the revolutionary situation. On the question of his order to murder, he refused to testify. He stressed that he had not planned Runge's butt and the disposal of Rosa Luxemburg's corpse. An unknown pistol shooter had been reported to him as the perpetrator. In 1969, the Süddeutscher Rundfunk broadcast the documentary Zeitgeschichte vor Gericht: Der Fall Liebknecht-Luxemburg. In it, Dieter Ertel interviewed contemporary witnesses from 1919 who were still alive, including Waldemar Pabst. According to their statements, the Reich Chancellery covered up the double murder and Hermann Souchon, not Kurt Vogel, fired the fatal shot at Rosa Luxemburg. Further documents supported this thesis. Günter Nollau had recorded a corresponding statement by Pabst to him in 1959. However, Souchon successfully sued Ertel and the SDR: the latter was only allowed to broadcast the documentary with the addition that there was no objective evidence. Ertel had to publicly retract his statements about Souchon after the broadcast. In 1970, Pabst's diary was discovered, in which he had noted in 1919 that he had telephoned the Reich Chancellery before the murders and had received Noske's backing for this.

In 1986 Margarethe von Trotta made the film Rosa Luxemburg and won the Federal Film Award for it. Barbara Sukowa received the acting prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the title role. In 1987 Günter Kochan composed his Music for Orchestra No. 2 based on letters by Rosa Luxemburg.

In 1987, a work of art was installed on the Landwehrkanal based on the initiative and designs of Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte. The accompanying commemorative plaque reads:

"In the struggle against oppression, militarism and war, the convinced socialist Rosa Luxemburg died / as the victim of an insidious political murder. / The disregard for life and the brutality against man / reveal man's capacity for inhumanity. / It cannot and must not be a means of any kind of conflict resolution. / Berlin 1987"

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which was founded in 1990 and is affiliated with the Left Party, regards Rosa Luxemburg as an outstanding representative of democratic-socialist thought and action in Europe. In 2008, the play Rosa about her premiered at the GRIPS Theater in Berlin. In May 2009, forensic pathologist Michael Tsokos doubted that Rosa Luxemburg's body had actually been buried in 1919. He considered an unknown female corpse from the Berlin Charité to be the dead woman. Other forensic experts and historians contradicted him. At the beginning of 2010, a street in Wünsdorf-Waldstadt was named after Rosa Luxemburg.

Today, a broad spectrum of left-wing groups, parties and individuals take part in the annual Liebknecht-Luxemburg commemorations in Berlin. The women's movement, the anti-militarist peace movement, the Socialist Youth and the globalisation critics also find an important role model in Rosa Luxemburg. From the perspective of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, commemorations of Luxemburg and Liebknecht are an important traditional element of German left-wing extremism.

Historians judge the current relevance of her theories differently. Margarete Maurer wrote in 1999 that Rosa Luxemburg's struggle against militarism was as relevant today as it had ever been, since, according to a UN report, more than 50% of all technical and scientific experts were directly or indirectly employed in arms production. For Sebastian Haffner († 1999), Rosa Luxemburg's ideas had "lost none of their relevance" despite the failure of her political goals. Jörn Schütrumpf (2006) found Rosa Luxemburg's critique of bureaucracies, "which turn into superfluous shells as soon as they act primarily as an end in themselves," "of frightening topicality." In the face of social movements like Fridays for Future and an affective society, according to Ernst Piper, the same is true again for Luxemburg's theory of spontaneity.

Eastern Europe

Democratic or reformist socialist opposition groups and civil rights activists in the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc often invoked Rosa Luxemburg: for example, in the Prague Spring of 1968 for freedom of expression and social democratisation. In non-aligned Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, she was one of the people invoked for workers' self-government.

On 13 March 2018, at the behest of the Lublin voivode, invoking the so-called "decommunisation law" of the ruling PiS party, the memorial plaque to Rosa Luxemburg was removed from the Luxemburg family home in Zamość.

There is a memorial plaque at her residence in Poznań.

Global South

Revolutionaries in "Third World" countries also drew on it for a Marxism independent of capitalism and Stalinism. Salvador Allende also based his politics in Chile on her theory of mass strikes. In 1971, the playwright Armand Gatti wrote a play Rosa Kollektiv in two versions, which depicted the different reception of Rosa Luxemburg in the GDR and the Federal Republic. He saw an enduring relevance of her ideas for revolutionaries in Africa and Latin America. Thus the socialist Rosa Bonaparte († 1975) was also referred to as the "Rosa Luxemburg of East Timor".

Other

Western Marxists like Michael A. Lebewitz adopted Luxemburg's position of the spontaneous self-activity of the working class, to which the left parties had to subordinate themselves, for a critique of the economic determinism of the late Karl Marx. Paul Sweezy, Riccardo Bellofiore, Samir Amin and other social scientists and economists interpreted their theory of imperialism as the first genuinely Marxist explanation of capitalist globalization. The theory of dependency developed in Latin America is considered an update of the theory of imperialism.

The International Rosa Luxemburg Society, a network of non-party scholars, has been holding a conference on her approximately every two to four years since 1980. So far, two of them have taken place in the People's Republic of China.

Movies

Ernst Thälmann - Son of his Class, DEFA, Director: Kurt Maetzig, Johannes Arpe, 1954
Solange Leben in mir ist, DEFA, Director: Günter Reisch, 1965 (first part of the Karl Liebknecht film biography)
In spite of everything! DEFA, directed by Günter Reisch, 1972 (second part of the Karl Liebknecht film biography).
Der Mord, der nie verjährt, DEFA, Director: Wolfgang Luderer, 1967
The Liebknecht-Luxemburg Case, FRG, directed by Dieter Ertel, 1969
Speak to the Point, Accused, DFF, Director: Wolfgang Luderer, 1970 (in the television series Fernsehpitaval)
Rosa Luxemburg - Stations of Her Life, DEFA, Director: Renate Drescher, 1971
Rosa Luxemburg (Film), BRD, Director: Margarethe von Trotta, 1986
Rosa Luxemburg - The Price of Freedom, BRD, Director: Inga Wolfram, 2017

Naming

Named after Rosa Luxemburg:

Rosa Luxemburg High School in Berlin
Officer College of the Border Troops of the GDR Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Dresden
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Radebeul
Rosa Luxemburg housing estate in Schipkau
Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße in Berlin and numerous other cities
Ship Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the party-affiliated foundation of DIE LINKE party
Rosa-Luxemburg-Steg, the western part of the Lichtenstein Bridge over the Landwehr Canal. It was so named on 25 September 2012.